Profile

Broad experience leading teams and producing high quality software. Received the highest performance ratings at multiple companies. Identified as a top contributor and received “Critical Talent Award” at PayPal. Selected as a future technical lead of IBM in IBM's “Fast Track” program.

I'm passionate about leading teams, solving problems, and helping others. I'm a mentor and educator both internally in the workplace and externally in the open source community. I'm regularly involved in local technical groups, hackathons, and meetups.

Experience

Team Lead, Front End

Signal

November 2017 - Present|Chicago, IL

Led the front end team to build out features in short iterations to provide value to our customers. This included working closely with product and design to decide on features to develop, then communicating that work out to the team while discussing impacts with the broader organization. Held daily standups, weekly planning meetings, and retrospectives to help gain insight into how we can improve the process.

Responsible for guiding the front end architecture along with mentoring junior developers. I regularly paired with engineers to assist in development, and could often be found drawing on a whiteboard to help explain difficult pieces of the system or how the team should move forward with a specific implementation. I worked with the operations team to build and deploy our applications in CI and in production, while also working alongside test teams to design our test strategy.

The UI applications were web based, using React, Redux, and Webpack on the client side and Node with Express on the server side. Node modules were developed to help share code across applications, which included a common set of UI components to retain consistency in the views.

Team Lead, Front End

CognitiveScale

August 2014 - November 2017|Austin, TX

Led both the team and the development of the user interface for CognitiveScale. Responsible for hiring new front end engineers, along with mentoring and leading the front end team. Held daily standups and retrospectives which included the design team as well, as we tried to integrate the efforts of both front end and design. Responsible for working with the product and business teams to break down customer requirements into work items for the front end team.

The UI was often web based, but some use cases required a native device application (iOS). The front end web technology was a mix of React, Redux, Webpack, and Babel, along with React Native in some experimental native development. Node.js was used to power the server side of the UI, utilizing Express for APIs and Mongo for storage. In earlier iterations, the front end used Angular, and in the native device case, a combination of Ionic and Angular.

Assisted the developer operations team on deployment of the Node.js applications, as well as production support for CognitiveScale applications. Helped build documentation and training around the use of CognitiveScale for customer sessions.

Co-Organizer and Mentor

Austin NodeSchool

September 2014 - March 2016|Austin, TX

Co-organizer, mentor, and frequent presenter of Austin NodeSchool. Helped build the Austin NodeSchool presence using the available open source community tools and encouraged others to help with this effort. Presented multiple workshops at events and helped answer questions outside the hosted events. More information can be found at Austin NodeSchool.

Mentor

MakerSquare

July 2014 - February 2015|Austin, TX

Volunteer for the MakerSquare mentor program. MakerSquare provides a three-month course for students who are interested in transitioning to a software engineering career. I often was paired with a student for me to mentor outside of class. I met with each of these students on a weekly basis and, during these meetings, helped with course material, answered questions, reviewed the student's resume, and provided advice about the industry.

Senior Software Engineer

XO Group, Labs

June 2013 – August 2014|Austin, TX

Analyzed internal bride data, and helped design a vendor app that provides vendors with a better understanding of their customers. Prototyped data endpoints and developed an Apple push notification service for the app. Setup an internal npm registry for internal Node.js packages, and helped developer operations design automation to deploy Node.js to production.

Researched price data available, and developed APIs useful in prototyping a mobile app experience around displaying the price of wedding related products for consumers. The APIs were developed in Node.js, using Express, and utilized Mongo as the backend database. Passport security was integrated to allow user profiles in the mobile app.

Developed an e-commerce marketplace platform to provide TheKnot vendors an ability to sell to the general public. The APIs were developed in Java/Spring, and utilized Spring Security. Designed and developed an admin interface to this system using Backbone.js, and used Node.js to both serve up the UI and test the backend APIs. Setup a Jenkins continuous integration server to run nightly builds and deploy to an AWS EC2 environment.

Senior User Interface Engineer

PayPal, Identity

January 2013 - June 2013|Austin, TX

Worked on the PayPal Identity program, providing support to customers who wish to use PayPal to identify themselves to third party merchant web sites.

Built and maintained third party JavaScript web applications which merchants could use to interact with the PayPal Identity offering, using mostly Backbone as a framework, Dust as a templating engine, and RequireJS to manage dependencies. Spring REST and Node.js (depending on the application) were used on the backend to manage sending data needed to the client (browser).

Senior Software Engineer, Development Lead

eBay, Resolutions Center

January 2012 - December 2012|Austin, TX

As part of the first eBay development team in Austin, helped in the transition of a large, legacy Java web application (the Resolution Center) hosted on the eBay website.

Led development and architecture of the Resolutions Center redesign as part of the Simplified Claim Filing project. This involved a major redesign of the legacy platform to an open source Spring/JAX-RS/OSGi based solution. The update also included adoption of a JavaScript MVW style framework for the front-end.

Continually involved in design, architecture, and planning of future work by aligning with the business, reaching out to external teams, and resource planning for FY2012/13 deliverables.

Senior Software Engineer

PayPal, Architecture Infrastructure Web Technology

January 2010 - January 2012|Austin, TX

Senior developer on web application infrastructure framework (Sparta). Developed, led and maintained code used by PayPal to host Java based applications running the PayPal website.

Architected and developed multiple Java based projects glued together with Maven, utilizing Spring for core configuration and web flow.

Designed and implemented Eclipse based plugins used by developers to build applications and add individual web pages to existing projects.

Lead technical developer on PayPal’s Digital Goods Express Checkout application, the first PayPal web flow to use “Remember Me” authentication.

Led education sessions across the company on how to use Java, Spring, Maven, Eclipse, and Sparta based applications in general.

Staff Software Engineer, Team Lead

PayPal, Core Technologies Automation

April 2008 - January 2010|Austin, TX

Created, designed, and implemented a Java based automation framework used by teams across PayPal.

Led an effort to migrate testing to this Java based framework, gave presentations on its need and benefits to executive level management while leading educational sessions across the company.

Staff Software Engineer

IBM, Web Services and Web Services Security Development

January 2007 - April 2008|Austin, TX

Acquired a proficiency in Web Services policy set framework and administrative console, in addition to Web Services Security internals and caching solutions.

Designed and implemented many features in Web Services, including schema definitions, working with JAXB generated objects, policy interactions, security role definitions, and multiple admin tasks.

Developed Web Services Security functions. This required an understanding of internal caching mechanisms and an expansion upon those using MBean and JDBC/Database solutions.

Staff Software Engineer, Team Lead

IBM, Web Services and Web Services Security Automation

2006 - 2007|Austin, TX

Created and led a WebSphere Console automation team using the GUI automation framework I designed and developed the previous year.

Began career manually testing the security panels of WebSphere Console (web interface), and found that moving the test team to a GUI automation solution would greatly increase efficiency of testing.

Led a team developing a framework using Rational Functional Tester (RFT, an Eclipse based tool formally known as XDE) to test the WebSphere Console. As more WebSphere Console FVT teams merged in, the framework was broadened to support the multiple users. The framework is currently in production today, and has led to patent submissions.

Led an RFT focused GUI Automation Community consisting of many members across IBM worldwide.